Asus P5N-D vs MSI P7N vs Evga 750i for 9600GT SLi

My rig:

Antec Nine Hundred
Coolermaster extremepower 550w
Pentium Dual-Core E2160
Zalman CNPS7700-Alcu
4GB Transcend DDR2-800
Asrock 4CoreDual-Sata2
Galaxy 9600GT 512MB
2x Sata DVD Burners (LG and Liteon)
Samsung 500GB Hard Drive (sata2)
2 PCI Cards

I'm deciding on a new motherboard, I will very soon get a second 9600GT.

Asus P5N-D:
2 is suitable number of SLI slots, and this mean more room for PCI and PCI-ex1 slots, 9600GTs only support 2-way sli. Not the best overclocking results and 24-pin connection is in a retarded position.

MSI P7N:
This is a 3-way sli 750i board, 1 x16 slot and 2 x8 slots, but I will never use the 3rd slot because 9600GT's only support 2-way SLI. Excellent cooling and overclocking results, great layout, but I will have no empty pci slots for future things, although I will probably be able to put a x1 card in the x8 slot. Cheapest out of the three.

Evga 750i:
Don't really know much about this board, but it's the most expensive out of the three.

I'm trying to save money here.

I think Asus is crap stay away lots of problems with their boards since they moved their production to china.

MSI: wouldn't really know never had their brand of board before.

Evga:I had their 680i it was an excellent motherboard, really good for overclocking also had 2x pci express x16 slots only first gen sli. but in the end i took it to far overclocked my Q6600 to 3.8ghz air cooled and did a stupid mistake of not running prime95 :doh:. so in the end my board malfunctioned and had to throw it away :eek: only thing it probably would of needed was a vcore increase :doh: couldnt rma it cuz it was off ebay.

so out the 3 personally I would choose Evga but if you plan on overclockin make sure you run prime95 :D

I have the P5N-D and run 9600gt in SLI, I have also overclocked my e8200 to 3.4ghz. For the board has been working absoloutly fine since I got it.

But the vdroop when overclocking is larger than I would expect it to be, and I have an unidentified piece of hardware shown in device manager on my pci slot(and there is nothing connected there).

Hi I also have an ASUS P5N-D. I had been using it fine for about 6 months now till I had a problem with the ethernet port. It just went dead. So I had to install a separate NIC card.

Since 9600GT is a single slot card, it would fit quite nicely in the motherboard.
However, in the future if you plan on getting a higher end card may GTX 280 which uses double slots, DO NOT buy the ASUS as the PCI-E slots are reallly close. It might cause overheating.

I dont know much about MSI or EVGA but I think both boards are quite good compared to the ASUS. Ive read in some articles that MSI is a very stable board and EVGA is good for overclocking.

Cheers.

Yeah, I've decided to get the Asus P5N-D. Thanks for your opinions.

I got my new motherboard yesterday, Asus P5N-D. I feel like my computer is now perfect The 4GB DDR2 was $50au and the Asus P5N-D was $120au.



And I got my 1.8ghz E2160 to reach 3.2ghz, and under load the temperature is 44C.


I'll probably add another 9600GT next.